Hi, I am Mike. I am the owner and the sole author of SingScales. I am not a vocal coach, nor a professional singer, I am just a lifelong student of voice.
I am a learner just like you. I wasted (yes, wasted) years and thousands of dollars on courses, books, and voice lessons. I tried most popular singing courses out there, and watch most of the vocal training videos on Youtube. I learned a ton on the way (a lot of it the hard way). And this is why I am here, sharing my lessons with you.
Are you a baritone having trouble with high notes? Sing scales! Do you have weak head voice? Sing scales! No breath support? You guessed it… Sing scales!
My story
My story is very sad, at least in retrospect.
It started with my dad. He played guitar in a band, and sang. I was way too young to actually remember him performing, but what I do remember very well was my mom saying to me when I was old enough to play guitar that my dad used to play and sing, and that he would have been better off just playing the guitar…
I was not accepted to the choir in high-school…
In my senior years I once offered to sing a lead for my school band where I was playing the guitar, and I got a telling look from our band leader.
Needless to say, from that point I stuck to my guitar, and haven’t even attempted to sing.
When I was 16 I became a Christian. I started singing along in the church meetings. We met regularly several times a week, so singing became a natural part of my life. I had a deep baritone voice which didn’t go unnoticed.
In my early 20s I was asked to join a group of other believers to record a CD of Christian songs. It was somewhat of a choir setting, and I sang the lowest parts. I was called the “meat” of the group, because I could produce low rumbling sounds that gave some substance to the recording.
Couple times I was given a higher solo phrase, but I failed at miserably. I didn’t enjoy the process, and would avoid doing any solo parts from that point on.
Fast forward 10 years. I am in my early 30s. I ended up in a situation where I had to play guitar and lead singing in a rather small group (less than 30 people). It was still somewhat of a sing-along, but now I had to kick off the song, and had to continue singing to help others follow along.
I struggled. I didn’t enjoy it one bit. I could not hit higher notes, even though most songs didn’t go much higher than middle C (C4). I could not keep the tune all the way to the end. I kept running out of breath. My throat hurt.
It was a real struggle, and I hated every moment of it.
Something had to change.
It was March of 2014. I was 33 then. I started looking online to see how to learn to sing. And this is where my journey really began.
The first book I came across was Jamie Vendera’s Raise Your Voice. It has stellar reviews on Amazon, and was fairly cheap, so I bought the PDF.
His top-down approach made sense. I’ve done the exercises for couple weeks, but didn’t notice any difference. And that’s when I made my first mistake that stalled my progress big time. Instead of committing to Vendera’s course for longer I started looking for a different perspective.
That’s when I came across Ken Tamplin. This guy can surely sing! He can also talk… his brilliant marketing and persuasion lead me to buy his course.
Tamplin’s approach was very different. Unlike Vendera, he insisted that we must use and develop our full voice and use it all the way up the range, and if we don’t our voice will atrophy. And even though I didn’t care about his rock style of singing, I surely didn’t want to end up with a weak voice.
Also because Ken Tamplin’s Vocal Academy (KTVA) is video based so it was easier to follow.
I took it as a gospel, and followed it to the T for some time.
I learned to hit very high notes on exercises (we are talking C5) here, but no matter what I did they sounded forced and strained. They also didn’t feel good.
So I took a face to face lesson with one of the KTVA students who happened to live in my city. He is a professional singer and recording artist. He definitely knew what he is talking about. But what surprised me is that he wasn’t very interested in talking about KTVA exercises, instead he gave me couple SLS exercise, something that Ken openly criticized, and I bought into it.
From that point on, I started looking more into SLS and other methods. I watched lots of Youtube videos, and read bunch of books.
Eventually I found coach Daniel. I heard him talk about Berton Coffin and his books. My degree is in linguistics, and I specialized in phonetics, so Coffin’s approach sparked my interest. I found his book, but could not make much sense of it, so I reach out to coach Daniel and took some Skype lessons with him.
We did talk about Coffin and his approach, but what surprised me the most is that Daniel gave me other SLS exercises, moreover he recommended Singing for the Stars by Seth Riggs as a great self-guided vocal program.
Daniel is also a professional singer, and a good one! He was a second guy I met who didn’t subscribe to most of what Tamplin was teaching, yet their voices sounded great.
I started to accept the fact that no vocal school has the full truth, and most working singers borrow a bit here and a bit there, whatever works for their voice.
Needless to say I bought the book.
To keep the story short, I dived deeper into Coffin’s teaching. I also took more lessons with coach Daniel.
Things finally started to come together not just in my mind but also in my voice. My practice routine changed, andI finally started making good progress.
I by no means arrived, but here I am sharing with you what I learned so far. I hope that my story and lessons learned will help you on your journey!
Cheers,
Michael
